Steve, his wife Alison, my husband and I enjoyed sharing our experiences about working and living in Switzerland. There was a memorial service Sunday which was overflowing with people, many from the local IT community. He will be greatly missed.

The following is from his family:Steven John Metsker passed away on Friday, February 8, 2008 after a short illness with cancer. Aged 49, he is survived by his loving wife, Alison, and their daughters, Sarah-Jane and Emma-Kate. Having earned Engineering degrees from both the Colorado State University and the University of Massachusetts, Steve was accomplished in a profession for which he had great passion. Born in Colorado, he also lived in Massachusetts, Maine, Texas, Switzerland, Kentucky, England, and Richmond. He made many friends everywhere he went. A loving and caring husband, father, brother, son, friend, and colleague, he was also a humble and wise mentor. He was a positive and loving influence on all of us, who will miss him dearly. In lieu of flowers please send donations to St. Baldrick's fund raising program for childhood cancer or to Our Lady's Children's Hospital, Dublin Ireland.

a Dynamic Ajax table example using jMaki and Java Persistence APIs on Glassfish

This Sample Catalog app demonstrates the usage of the Java Persistence APIs to implement server side pagination (recommended for large sets of data), and jMaki to get and display the results in a dynamic Ajax table.

The sample application's index.jsp page uses a jMaki yahoo.dataTable widget to display a list of customers in a dynamic table.

The jMaki table widgets (there is also a jMaki dojo table widget) are useful when you want to show a set of results in tabular data on a web page. Table widgets provide sortable columns, row selection, and they can be updated using jMaki publish subscribe events.

In the List.jsp web page the dataTable is defined as shown below: (Note:Redcolors are for jMaki tags or variables, and Green for my code orvariables)

To determine the data format and events for the table you can refer to the jMaki Table Data Model or look at the widget.json file for the table widget. This file is located in the resources/yahoo/dataTable directory.The serviceattribute references the CatalogServiceservlet which returns the data to be included in the table. The data for the table should be a JSON object containing an object of columns and an array of row arrays. The column names need a unique id which is then used in the data to associate it with a given row. An example for a table of companies is shown below:

Java Persistence Query API

The Catalog getCustomersJSON()uses the Java Persistence API Queryobject to return a list of customers, a JSONArray object is used to return the list in JSON format. The Java Persistence Query APIs are used to create and execute queries that can return a list of results. The JPA Query interface provides support for pagination via the setFirstResult() and setMaxResults() methods: query.setMaxResults(int maxResult) sets the maximum number of results to retrieve.query.setFirstResult(int startPosition) sets the position of the first result to retrieve.

In the code below, we show the Customerentity class which maps to the CUSTOMER table that stores the customer instances. This is a typical Java Persistence entity object. There are two requirements for an entity:

Connecting the listener to the handlerThe listener handler for the /button/nexttopic is shown below. First you declare the topic to listen to and then the listener function which will handle the notification. The/button/nextlistener handler increments the page number and then calls the getNextPagefuntion.

The getNextPagefunction uses jmaki.doAjax, which provides an easy way to make an XMLHttpRequest, to call the CatalogServiceservlet passing the page number as a URI parameter. The callbackfunction uses eval to convert the XMLHttpRequest response into a JSON object. Then jmaki.publishis called to publish the returned customersJSON object to the /table/addRowstopic.

The yahoo.dataTable widget subscribes to thetabletopic.Subscribe events allow you to manipulate a given instance of a widget. The event names are appended to the the subscribe topic name following a "/". For example "/table/addRows" will call the yahoo.dataTableaddRowsfunction which will add the payload value passed to the widget to the the table. This will cause the returnedcustomersJSON object to be displayed in the table on the html page.

The CatalogServletsimply calls the Catalog class to get the next list of results from the database like we saw in the previous code. The CatalogServletthen returns the resulting JSONArray as a text string.

ConclusionThis concludes the sample application which demonstrates the usage of the Java Persistence APIs and jMaki in a dynamic Ajax table example.

Configuration of the Application for jMaki, JPA, Netbeans 6.1 and Glassfish V2

Download the sample code and extract its contents. You should now see the newly extracted directory as<sample_install_dir>/JPAjmaki, where <sample_install_dir> is the directory where you installed the sample package. For example, if you extracted the contents to C:\ on a Windows machine, then your newly created directory should be atC:\JPAjmaki.

Start the NetBeans IDE. Click Open Project in the File menu and select the JPAjmaki directory you just unzipped.

Build the project as follows:

Right click the JPAjmaki node in the Projects window.

Select Clean and Build Project.

Run the project as follows:

Right click the JPAjmaki node in the Projects window.

Select Run Project.

When you run the project, your browser should display the opening page of the Sample Application (at http://localhost:8080/JPAjmaki/).